Public Citizen FOIA Reveals That Pharma, Not Patients Are Favored In Trump’s Drug Pricing Deals
Key Takeaways
- Copies of Pfizer and Eli Lilly’s “most-favored nation” (MFN) agreements obtained by Public Citizen through the Freedom of Information Act are heavily redacted, making it difficult for the public to assess the true impact of the secret deals made with the Trump White House. The redactions reflect the administration’s disdain for the transparency and accountability the American people deserve.
- The agreements reveal concerning terms that will help facilitate pharma companies charging more for drugs abroad or discontinuing supplying drugs in other countries so that they can continue to charge U.S. customers high prices, suggesting that the Trump team may be doing more to protect pharma profits than patient pocketbooks.
- The White House has called out its work to get GLP-1 diabetes and obesity treatments at lower price points under MFN deals as one of the highlights of these agreements. But Lilly’s deal contains a loophole that insulates it from providing a true MFN price point for its GLP-1 drugs. If the loophole is applied to all GLP-1 drugs, it could cost Medicaid $1.7 billion in savings.
- The documents contain information that calls into question the veracity of previously communicated information on the MFN agreements. Pfizer’s agreement states that its terms supersede the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation Center’s GENEROUS model, which outlines how state Medicaid programs can get MFN pricing, if there are conflicts.
- The perks to pharma are not public in the documents. Understanding the scope of the industry perks is particularly important given that some of the benefits to industry have already been realized while there remains considerable skepticism that other parts of the agreements that would benefit U.S. patients will ever get off the ground.
Sham Deals
President Donald Trump has for months claimed he got American’s the world’s lowest prices on prescriptions drugs, but his administration has repeatedly refused to provide the public with the text of the “most-favored nation” (MFN) agreements reached with 27 pharmaceutical companies to effectuate those prices.[1]
American patients pay far too much for drugs and should be able to purchase their medicines at similar prices to the lower costs paid in peer countries. But health policy must be made publicly, not through confidential deals with powerful corporations like Big Pharma, which has a vested interest in keeping American drug prices high. Drug company and investor statements that indicate they do not anticipate major financial impacts from the deals, and evidence that Trump has exaggerated his recent drug pricing achievements, along with Trump’s past failures in implementing his drug pricing policies and achieving lower drug costs, make it even more important to assess whether his rhetoric matches reality.
Public Citizen sued to gain access to MFN deals struck with pharma giants Pfizer and Eli Lilly after the Trump administration failed to respond to our Freedom of Information Act requests (FOIA) for the agreements and any connected contracts or documentation
Nearly six months after the lawsuit was filed, and ten months after the White House announced the first of these agreements with Pfizer, the Trump administration provided copies of the so-called “most-favored nation” (MFN) agreements to Public Citizen that continue to reflect the administration’s disdain for the transparency and accountability the American people deserve as large quantities of information remain hidden from public view due to redactions.
The dates of the documents provided to Public Citizen also indicate that the government was not fully transparent about the progress it had made in negotiating MFN deals. For both Pfizer and Eli Lilly, the government appeared to publicize its commitments with the companies as final deals, months before it ironed out crucial details and secured binding commitments. For example, Pfizer’s deal with the White House was announced Sept. 30, 2025, but the letter of agreement reached between the parties on this date was only the precursor to definitive agreements that still needed to be negotiated and executed to effectuate the MFN deal. Pfizer’s letter of agreement said that it was “intended only to create the obligation between the parties to engage in diligent and good faith negotiations on the terms of future Definitive Agreement(s),” and that neither party was obligated to enter into a future Definitive Agreement(s). Pfizer entered into a definitive MFN drug pricing agreement on Feb. 23, 2026, nearly five months after the administration told the public its goals were achieved. The Pfizer and Lilly documents also include indications that other parts of the MFN agreements would be finalized in documents not yet received by Public Citizen. These parts appear to have not been complete as of March 16, 2026, as the government told Public Citizen it was provided with all the final documents responsive to its FOIA in the government’s custody as of March 16, 2026. The Pfizer and Lilly documents we received do not include all parts of the MFN agreements that the documents themselves indicate need to be executed in order for the agreements to take effect.
Still, despite the redactions and missing documents, the text obtained by Public Citizen reveals details never previously disclosed, including some concerning giveaways to pharma companies that could harm U.S. patients and those overseas, such as a loophole for GLP-1 obesity drugs that could cost Medicaid nearly $1.7 billion in savings.
Blacked Out Text Trumps Radical Transparency
Key Terms Obscured
The Pfizer MFN agreement is redacted such that it leaves the public unable to extract the most important pieces of information necessary to assess the agreement’s impact and to know whether, as the Trump administration has called for, Congress should attempt to permanently codify these deals. The redactions obscure what Pfizer drugs are covered under the deal, how an MFN price is determined, and make it difficult to predict if these are likely to be fair price points for American consumers. These details are critically important as drug companies have come up with creative ways to make net positive achievements for the companies sound like MFN price concessions. For example, Pfizer and Bristol Myers Squibb lowered the list price of Eliquis in context of the MFN price negotiations, a move that actually helped Pfizer achieve higher net pricing and 25% more revenues on the drug in the U.S. in the second quarter of 2026 compared to the second quarter of 2025. In other cases, drug companies have revealed just one or a handful of their drugs are covered under their deals despite implications from the White House the pledges were more inclusive.
Redactions Complicate Assessment of Previously Public Information
Pfizer’s agreement also says that its terms supersede the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation Center’s GENEROUS model, which details how state Medicaid programs can get MFN pricing, if there are conflicts. This makes the redactions even more problematic as the public can’t use already available documents on the model to fill in the missing pieces. It also makes it impossible for states to make informed decisions regarding GENEROUS participation if they cannot rely on the accuracy of publicly communicated information from CMS. And it raises concerns that there may be other redacted information in these documents that calls into question the public’s understanding of facts previously made public about the MFN-connected programs.
Lilly’s agreement indicates a definition for manufacturer-reported net international price that is slightly different from GENEROUS. Lilly’s agreement defines the price at the active ingredient level, versus the more specific nine-digit National Drug Code (NDC)-9 level specified in GENEROUS. This distinction could impact the price point selected for an MFN price. Unlike in the Pfizer agreement, there is no indication in the unredacted text of Lilly’s agreement as to what happens if there is conflict between the agreement and the GENEROUS model.
Both Pfizer and Lilly’s agreements offer no detail on how the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will negotiate the coverage criteria for drugs with MFN pricing for Medicaid under GENEROUS. These details are critical for states in deciding whether they want to participate in the program and for understanding which patients may benefit from these MFN deals. GENEROUS forces states to utilize the coverage criteria negotiated by the federal government and pharma, which impacts who is qualified to receive a drug and what if any steps they will have to go through to get the product such as prior authorization or step therapy. It is possible that CMS could negotiate coverage criteria for a drug that forces states to provide a significantly larger patient population with treatment, without receiving a corresponding significant decrease in price. Or GENEROUS could force states to adopt step therapy, making it harder for some patients to access a drug than the state previously made it. Pfizer’s agreement suggests more specifics on its GENEROUS commitment were to be detailed in another GENEROUS participation agreement reached separately with CMS that would be entered into by March 31, 2026. March 31, 2026, is six months after President Trump announced the administration had entered its MFN deal with Pfizer. As of Sept. 17, 2026, the government has not provided Public Citizen with Pfizer’s GENEROUS participation agreement.
Durability Questions
Moreover, there are some worrying signs about the durability of the agreement due to the redactions. Page 21 of Pfizer’s MFN agreement signed by the company on Feb. 23, 2026, says that “Pfizer shall have the right to terminate this Agreement immediately if,” and then redacts the information that can trigger the termination. There is no information on what remedies HHS has if Pfizer terminates the deal, or if there are any penalties for non-compliance.
Also blotted out is language that explains what happens if Pfizer “licenses, transfers, or sells the rights to a Covered Product in the U.S. to any other person,” making it impossible to know whether Americans are protected from industry gaming tactics, like transferring drug ownership to a connected entity to get out of price cuts.
Manufacturing, Tariff Info Missing
Nearly all the pages of Lilly’s initial Nov. 6, 2025, letter of agreement with the White House are redacted. In many cases, so much text is blacked out, including headers, that we cannot determine what issue that text covers. But we know from previous public announcements key portions of the deal is missing, as even Lilly’s more public Feb. 23, 2026 agreement does not provide any detail on the domestic manufacturing commitments the drug company reportedly made as part of the deal, nor do Lilly’s documents speak to the tariff relief the Trump administration said the company has received. Public Citizen received documents from the Department of Commerce that discuss Pfizer’s manufacturing commitments and tariff exemptions, but crucial information like the total manufacturing investment required of Pfizer is not public and the Pfizer-Commerce agreements provided are not the definitive agreement, as all are dated before an April White House document listed Pfizer as not having a final tariff agreement with the company. Public Citizen was provided with a draft, but not final, tariff agreement for Lilly, despite the April White House documents indicating a final tariff agreement with Lilly was signed Feb. 23, 2026, and should have qualified for production under our FOIA.
No Sign Of GLOBE, GUARD Carve Outs
In both Lilly and Pfizer’s documents, there is no obvious language addressing the exemptions drugmakers who signed these MFN agreements were given from other Trump efforts to bring down the cost of drugs in Medicare known as the GLOBE and GUARD demonstration projects. Without this information, the public cannot verify the effectiveness of the government in achieving lower drug prices. Excluding all of the initial 17 companies that agreed to MFN deals from GLOBE and GUARD would reduce the potential savings from those pilots by 71%, Thomas Hwang, director of the Cancer Innovation and Regulation Initiative at Harvard Medical School, predicts. Excluding all 27 companies would mean there would be few drugs left that would qualify for GLOBE and GUARD.
MFN Program with Most Projected Savings, Most Redacted
A particularly glaring omission in both Pfizer’s and Lilly’s documents is the definition of “newly launched” drug. The administration has implied that companies’ commitments to launch new medicines at MFN prices in the U.S. market are broad, but some drug manufacturers have disclosed key exemptions, such as for rare disease treatments, that suggest otherwise. The documents also do not provide any information detailing what U.S. health programs or U.S. patients get access to MFN pricing for newly launched drugs and how. The White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) analysis attributes the bulk of MFN savings to the newly launched drug provisions as these prices are supposed to apply to all U.S. markets, including private insurance. Yet Lilly’s initial press release on its MFN deal said its agreement “does not include pricing obligations in the commercial channel.” Moreover, given the complexity and fragmentation of the U.S. health system, it is important to understand how the Trump administration can require and enforce this provision. This is particularly important in absence of legislation. The documents do not publicly show how the Trump administration envisions both the U.S. health system and individual patients receiving benefits from the planned lower price points, as the U.S. system’s complexity can lead to situations where patients don’t directly benefit from lower drug prices. It is also not clear how Trump could set up such a program under the timeframe of his MFN agreements or deal with determining an MFN price point if a drug launches in the U.S. first, as is typical of many pharma products.
Arbitrary Omissions
The redacted information in one company’s agreement versus another appears inconsistent and often arbitrary, raising questions about whether the information truly meets the definition of trade secrets and confidential commercial or financial information that can be withheld. For example, Pfizer’s deal indicates it terminates on Jan. 20, 2029, the end of the Trump administration, confirming what many expected, that these were at most 3-year deals. In comparison, Lilly’s deal references a “covered period”, but the end date of the period is not provided in public text. An entire section on “termination” of the agreement is redacted.
Other information redacted from Pfizer’s agreement, such as the definitions of “covered product,” “MFN pricing”, “manufacturer-reported net price,” and “specified country(ies)” is visible in Lilly’s agreement. And some of these definitions like “MFN pricing” and “specified countries” were already publicly disclosed in the May CEA analysis of the MFN agreements. That some of this information was already at least partially made public in other documents connected to the deals raises additional questions about whether the redactions were done in a manner that complies with FOIA’s presumption of openness.
Pharma Perks Not Detailed
Neither agreement contains a publicly viewable mention of all of the benefits the U.S. government is providing in exchange for these price concessions, such as the tariff exemptions Trump promised in return for these deals or the lucrative Commissioner’s National Priority Vouchers for faster Food and Drug Administration product reviews companies like Lilly are reported to have received for entering into these MFN deals. The public needs to understand the full details of the incentives Big Pharma is getting for these deals to be able to evaluate whether science-based decisionmaking at FDA is being compromised or the pricing concessions industry may be making justifies these perks.
The details and connection between the MFN deals and the FDA vouchers are critical as the voucher program appears to have given FDA unprecedented and potentially illegal authority to base agency review timelines on a drug company’s pricing or manufacturing commitments, whereas FDA’s other expedited review authorities are based on a product’s likelihood to address an urgent health need or make a significant health advancement and were explicitly authorized by Congress. Concerns have emerged that the Trump team is trading pharma cooperation on one of his key political priorities – drug pricing – to allow companies to cut the FDA line and push back more important public health advancements to the end of the queue, while compromising public safety due to the speed of the reviews called for. The voucher program has also resulted in other concerns of political interference and corporate lobbying undermining a process that is supposed to be science-based to protect the safety of vulnerable consumers. Absent also are key details on how expansive the voucher benefits are. For example, how many vouchers did Lilly receive and can the same drug use a voucher for multiple speedy FDA approvals for different drug uses?
The agreements also don’t detail the scope of the U.S. government’s commitments to pressure foreign governments to raise their drug prices as the White House has indicated it is doing as part of its MFN strategy. In the case of the United Kingdom, the U.S. government both helped the drug industry achieve higher drug prices and ensured that when companies give the UK a good deal on a drug, that this lower price won’t be used as the U.S. reference price point. The pharma trade deal between the two countries published in April says that “the government of the United States commits that—consistent with the provisions of the GENEROUS Model—where the United Kingdom’s price for a New Medicine is the lowest in the reference basket of comparator countries, the Medicaid MFN price will not anchor on this lowest price.”
Understanding the scope of the industry perks is particularly important given that some of the benefits, like the FDA vouchers and foreign government commitments to raise drug prices have already benefited pharma companies, while there remains considerable skepticism that other parts of the agreements, like the Medicaid MFN program GENEROUS, will ever get off the ground or meaningfully impact Medicaid drug spending. After extending the time states have to apply, the White House announced on September 18 that all 50 states have filed applications. Filing an application does not obligate a state to participate in the pilot. It is not clear whether the government negotiated into these deals any protection for the patients and government if this or other hurdles persist to Americans getting lower drug prices, yet pharma already received some of the valuable incentives from signing the deals. Indeed, the HHS-Pfizer agreement makes explicit that Pfizer’s compliance is not contingent on any state’s participation in GENEROUS.
Giveaways To Big Pharma That Will Harm Americans and Patients Overseas
Despite the extensive redactions, Public Citizen was able to glean some important pieces of information about these pharma deals from the provided documents. Unfortunately, some of these details reveal concerning loopholes that exemplify why complete transparency is so critical. For example, the Trump administration agreed to conditions in the most-favored nation agreement with Lilly that will allow the company to avoid offering lower drug price points to Americans and hurt patients in other countries. Lilly’s agreement allows the company to stop supplying a drug to a reference country, notify the American government and in return get that country’s price point excluded from the calculation of MFN price. The drug industry has for months been using the Trump MFN deals as an excuse to threaten other countries that they will stop supplying drugs to their residents unless countries pay the industry more. In a few cases, pharma has already made certain drugs inaccessible.
By agreeing to terms that endorse and facilitate pharma companies discontinuing supplying drugs in other countries, so they can continue to charge U.S. customers more, the Trump team appears to be doing more to protect pharma profits than patients’ pocketbooks. The drug industry can afford to sell its medicines to Americans for less without harming people in other countries and without harming innovation.
If similar terms are part of the Pfizer deal, then they are redacted from public view. However, Pfizer’s agreement also includes a key disclosure that provides more evidence that these MFN agreements are often designed to do more to help drug companies make more money off patients in other countries than they are to get the U.S. the best prices currently available in these countries.
Pfizer’s agreement lays out a partially redacted framework that indicates Pfizer will share some portion of the increase in net revenue that Pfizer realizes from sales of ex-U.S. versions of drugs due to increased net prices of such drugs. Redactions make it unclear how many of the agreement’s covered products and what amount of net revenues will go to the U.S. government. We also don’t know what part of the U.S. government receives this money and what it can be spent on, making it impossible to know whether the money will be put to a positive public health benefit like increased drug affordability. Lilly’s agreement has a similarly titled section on returning increased revenues to American patients, but its entire contents are redacted. Despite the redactions, the overall harm is clear. Trump and the drug companies are agreeing to a scheme that explicitly pushes the raising of prices overseas, thereby inflating the reference price U.S. patients will receive and placing new financial strain on other governments. The winner in this situation is Big Pharma which, along with Trump, has been perpetuating a myth that the current premium prices paid in the U.S. are necessary to ensure continued pharmaceutical innovation, despite there being no link between drug prices and the costs of research and development and pharma spending only a minority of its revenue on R&D while spending more on self-enriching activities like stock buybacks and dividends and executive compensation.
Research by Mengyuan Fu and colleagues at Yale back up these concerns and raise the possibility that drug launches will be delayed overseas to keep U.S. prices high. Their findings suggest that, for newly approved novel therapeutics entering the GLOBE and GUARD models over time pricing benchmarks may “be vulnerable to strategically delayed launches or price increases by manufacturers, an impact seemingly aligned with the current administration’s goals.” Already, in Switzerland, about one-third of new innovative medicines were not submitted for coverage under Switzerland’s mandatory health insurance system between January 2025 and June 2026, due to concerns lower prices there could affect their U.S business under Trump’s MFN policies.
Instead of pushing drug prices overseas higher, the U.S. could pair measures to lower drug prices with increased support for biomedical research and development – to ensure innovation that meets our health needs.
Deals Rely Heavily On Pharma Price Reporting
Lilly: Potential Pricing Gaming?
The definition of “Manufacturer-Reported Net Price” in Lilly’s Feb. 23 agreement allows for the exclusion of the value of any patient financial assistance programs, free drug programs or “similar programs where no charge is made” for a drug from the net price received abroad. The exclusion of this financial assistance could help Lilly game the MFN system, by letting it raise the reference pricing points overseas and thus the MFN price used in the U.S., while insulating patients in reference countries from this change via financial assistance. Positively, the definition ensures that the U.S. should get access to the ex-U.S. prices of a drug even if Lilly doesn’t hold the marketing rights to the drug overseas and the net price must account for the value of discounts, rebates and other price concessions like manufacturer-level or portfolio-level discounts, rebates and claw backs, meaning manufacturers can’t provide the U.S. a list price. However, it’s not clear from the Lilly deal how the U.S. would get access to this net data, particularly if Lilly is not the company marketing the drug in a particular country or if contracts with foreign governments require that these discounts and rebates remain confidential.
Pfizer: Secret Out To Hide Data
The unredacted portions of Pfizer’s agreement suggest drug companies themselves are largely entrusted by the Trump administration to provide accurate information about the prices countries in the MFN reference basket pay for drugs, even though the agreement acknowledges Pfizer may be legally prohibited from providing much of this data. For example, one of the only details not redacted in the section “Calculating Net Effective MFN Price and U.S. Net Effective Price For Newly Launched Drugs,” in Pfizer’s Feb. 23 agreement says Pfizer “shall calculate net prices under this Section for Newly Launched Drugs using good faith, reasonable assumptions as determined by Pfizer.”
No information is available that publicly explains the type of “alternative, aggregated or anonymized information,” Pfizer is permitted to use to “substantiate Drug Prices,” if it is unable to provide the data required under the agreement due to restrictions imposed by foreign laws and regulations, and there is no information on what efforts will be taken by the federal government to ensure this is still reasonably equivalent to the MFN price points the U.S. is supposed to achieve. Other countries that utilize external reference pricing struggle to obtain the true price points received by other nations due to secret discounts given on top of public maximum reimbursement rates and employ other strategies to estimate these confidential discounts,
There also appears to be a redacted secret condition in section 8.4.1 of the Feb. 23 agreement that would allow Pfizer to withhold the international drug pricing information required under the MFN agreement. The provision reads: “If Pfizer is unable to provide international drug pricing data required under this Agreement due to restrictions imposed by applicable foreign laws, regulations, b4 redaction, as of the Effective Date, Pfizer shall promptly notify CMS in writing, describing the nature of the restriction, the legal authority, and the affected data.” This redaction makes it impossible to know how expansive the ability for Pfizer to get out of providing such data is.
Further, the confidentiality provisions negotiated in Section 13 of Pfizer’s agreement, appear to give the government and Pfizer broad authority to keep all of this information secret for long after the agreement is concluded.
Favoritism Could Cost More Than $1 Billion
The White House has often called out its work to get GLP-1 diabetes and obesity treatments at lower price points under MFN deals as one of the highlights of these agreements. But Lilly’s deal reveals that Trump may have insulated some GLP-1s from deeper discounts required of other drugs subject to his MFN agreements. The definition of “covered product, in Lilly’s Feb. 23 agreement excludes Lilly’s newest and most popular GLP-1 products meaning Medicaid programs that participate in GENEROUS cannot get the benefit of MFN price points for Lilly’s tirzepatide products Zepbound and Mounjaro.
The Lilly agreement lays out a different program, BALANCE, to get some patients in Medicaid and Medicare a lower price on Lilly’s GLP-1s’s negotiated by Trump. But BALANCE’s $245 price point is higher than the list prices paid for Mounjaro and Zepbound in some of the reference countries, indicating that Medicaid might do better using the MFN approach to lowering GLP-1 prices, not Trump’s special negotiated price point.
A post-hoc analysis conducted by Hwang and provided to Public Citizen found that GENEROUS would lose up to $0.3 billion in savings in its first model year if Lilly’s Zepbound and Mounjaro were excluded.
If Novo Nordisk’s GLP-1 products Wegovy and Ozempic are also excluded from GENEROUS — a reasonable assumption since the negotiated $245 price applies to products by both manufacturers — the impact would be even more dramatic: up to $1.3 billion in lost savings. Together, the exclusion of Lilly and Novo’s GLP-1s could lead to somewhere between $1 billion and $1.7 billion in lost savings in the first GENEROUS model year, or 12 to 20% of the $8.6 billion Hwang initially predicted GENEROUS could save. That’s a significant portion of the model’s savings lost, just from these products.
Lilly’s MFN deal also establishes terms for BALANCE that could make it more difficult for states to enact their own additional drug price control policies. The Lilly deal says that the company does not have to execute any state’s BALANCE supplemental rebate agreement, unless the state agrees to a waiver “of any Law applicable in such State that is inconsistent with or conflicts with the terms of this Agreement, including such Laws that impose specific most-favored-nation, reference pricing, or other price restrictions on the sale of GLP Products in such State with respect to Medicaid.” This could make it challenging for states to both participate in BALANCE and continue with other work that could get more affordable GLP-1s to patients who don’t qualify for BALANCE. For example, Maryland’s Prescription Drug Affordability Board voted in May 2026 to cap what state and local government health plans pay for Ozempic, at $274 for a month’s supply, starting in January 2027. This Maryland plan might need to be waived for the state to take part in BALANCE, negatively impacting some Maryland residents. A state should not be forced by the federal government to make drug prices more unaffordable for one segment of its population in order to assist another segment via BALANCE.
States had until the end of July to enter BALANCE and only one state, Indiana, has publicly said it opted in.
TrumpRx Loopholes
Pfizer’s agreement grants the company a significant loophole regarding its participation in TrumpRx, the administration’s website where companies striking MFN deals must offer discounts on some of their products directly to patients paying cash. Its deal says the company “has no obligation to offer Covered Products to patients enrolled in any federal health care program…through a DTP platform, though the company may voluntarily allow its DTP offerings to apply to all patients. In comparison, Lilly’s agreement says that it must offer its cash prices on GLP-1s to all patients regardless of their insurance status, including government insurance.
The Pfizer agreement redacts the list of products and prices Pfizer will offer on TrumpRx even though the company already has public information on that website. And the agreement indicates Pfizer has some authority to raise the prices of drugs on the website on an annual basis, though the criteria that permits such price hikes are not made public. Lillys agreement contains no public information on its direct-to-consumer price commitments beyond the GLP-1 products, even though other company drugs are on the website.
A Not So Favored Nation
The nearly 120 pages of heavily redacted documents Public Citizen received about Pfizer and Elil Lilly’s MFN deals obscure much of the critical information needed to assess the true value of these drug pricing agreements to the American public, including a full accounting of the perks Big Pharma obtained for striking these deals with President Trump. Many documents connected to Pfizer’s and Eli Lilly’s agreements have not been provided at all.
The information available suggests the public should be cautious about Trump’s claims regarding the savings and benefits achieved for the American people. Indeed, available information suggests the agreements may cause harm to patients in the U.S. and abroad. In the U.S., harm may come through potentially dangerous changes to the FDA approval process and distracting from real pricing reform. Patients abroad are also likely to be harmed as the deals are designed to help the drug industry raise the cost of some medicines and could lead to the unavailability of certain medicines overseas.
Americans pay far too much for drugs. Trump and Congress can change this, without harming patients in other countries or innovation. But instead of transparently pursuing such options, the Trump administration is largely engaging in policy theater, telling Americans he has gotten them the best deals in the world, while behind the scenes helping to boost Big Pharma’s bottom line and covering up the information needed for the public to fully appreciate reality.
[1] Incyte has announced it has reached an MFN deal with the White House, though the White House has not named the company.